MT Hood Sunrise

On the morning of January 16, 2022, I went to the Columbia River in Camas Washington and took a time lapse video of the sunrise with the beautiful Mount Hood visible on the horizon. I considered focusing more on the mountain, but the whole sky was too amazing to sacrifice.

For the past few months, I’d been trying to capture the time when the sunlight hits the underside of the clouds, a phenomenon which can only take place for a few minutes every morning and evening if there aren’t any other clouds in the way. This is my favorite view! When the Earth is spinning, there’s a very limited amount of time when the angle of the sunlight can come from under the clouds. After that point, the Sunlight is hitting the top of the clouds.. All the other times when I witnessed this happening, I was either at work or otherwise preoccupied. The Northwest winters are usually too cloudy and raining, so I got frustrated whenever I saw the red clouds and I was unable to capture it.

Some might be annoyed by the weeds in the shot, but I like what they add to the view. They were the price to pay for an uninterrupted location where passersby wouldn’t disturb the setup. A couple other people were at the waterfront park to photograph the sunrise, but I was the only one taking a video. I had a nice conversation with this older gentleman and we swapped stories of seeing the sunrise at the Cape Horn trail in the Columbia River gorge. While my phone was recording, I walked the trail there by the river and then to the docks at the Camas port. It was a great morning.

For anyone interested, I had my phone time lapse set to 32X, so for every 32 seconds that passed, the phone recorded 1 second of video.